On Friday, American lawyer and law professor Peter Erlinder was arrested in Rwanda. His alleged crime is “genocide denial”, one of a set of offenses prosecutable in Rwanda under the 2008 “Law Relating to the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Ideology”. That law has been used to subject Erlinder’s client, opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire, to house arrest since shortly after her return to Rwanda from the Netherlands. Erlinder knew that he was risking arrest in coming to Rwanda – he has been a fierce critic of President Kagame’s administration, is representing accused genocidaire Major Aloys Ntabakuze at the international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, and warned the US State Department and the Minnesota congressional delegation before making the trip.

Rwanda is a fascinating and divisive place for people concerned with the future of Africa. For some, the country is a model of stability, economic growth and the empowerment of women. Michael Fairbanks, economic advisor to the Kagame government and influential management consultant, offers a passionate defense for the direction of the country in a recent column… so passionate that it appears to accuse of racism anyone who disagrees with his interpretation.

On the other hand, human rights and press freedom organizations have expressed concerns for years that Rwanda has been functioning as a one party state, putting insurmountable obstacles in the path of opposition parties and silencing independent media. This pressure appears to be increasing in the lead up to August presidential elections – in recent months, Rwanda has suspended two independent newspapers, forced a Human Rights Watch researcher out of the country, arrested an opposition leader and prevented two opposition parties from registering from participating in the election. These recent actions led US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson to comment earlier this week on the “worrying actions” taken by the Rwandan government.

I was last in Rwanda in 2002, helping Geekcorps set up a program to provide assistance to a Kigali-based technology firm which had been contracted to build a database to schedule and manage the Gacaca court system. What I remember most from visit was the way in which the genocide would creep into conversations at unexpected intervals. Coming into Kigali from Butare, my driver stopped at a shop on the outskirts of town, went inside and quickly returned with a frilly pink girl’s dress. I asked him how many children he had, and his response – “six – two of my own, and four of my brother’s who escaped the genocide” – quickly turned into a harrowing tale of searching for his nieces and nephews as they hid in the jungle. The genocide is still recent, raw history for everyone in the country, and it’s possible to understand why – given the role of the media in instigating violence – the Kagame government would seek to keep ethnic divisions out of media and politics.

There’s a fine line between preventing incitement to violence and silencing legitimate speech… and it’s not clear to me that the Kagame government has been on the right side of that line. In 2007, Michael Kavanagh reported for On The Media about a Rwandan radio soap opera – Musekeweya – which talks about the tensions between two villages, which are perpetually on the verge of mass violence. The parallels to Hutu/Tutsi conflict are apparent to everyone listening to the show (as much as 80% of the country), but the show stays out of trouble with the authorities by never explicitly mentioning Hutus or Tutsis.

More explicit dialog about what happened between Hutus and Tutsis in 1994 is now complicated by the 2008 Genocide Ideology Law, which is broad, vague and terrifies human rights and freedom of expression organizations. Article XIX released a detailed comment on the new law which reads, in part:

the definition of “genocide ideology” violates international law on genocide and “hate speech” in multiple ways. Furthermore, the system of penalties also breaches international human rights law, particularly with respect to children. We contend that the law is so contrary to international human rights law and humanitarian values that it is fundamentally flawed.

And this law now appears to be a useful tool for challenging political participation. When Victoire Ingabire returned to Rwanda, she visited the genocide memorial museum in Kigali and questioned why it didn’t commemorate any of the Hutus who died in the violence. This question led Kagame’s foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo to characterize Ingabire’s actions as “very deliberate, controversial ethnic politics, this woman really has a genocidal ideology”.

In interviews with US and UK media, Ingabire seems pretty far from expressing support for genocide – her issue appears to be the governments’ unwillingness to address violence against Hutu by Kagame’s conquering RFP army. In an interview today with the New York Times about the arrest of her lawyer, she said, “There was a genocide against the Tutsi, but there were also crimes against humanity, and Kagame doesn’t like to talk about that.”

I’ve been looking for information online today about Peter Erlinder, to get a sense for why the Rwandan government would risk a diplomatic conflict with the US over his arrest. In the process, I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had yesterday with Jay Rosen about the role of explanatory journalism. Jay points out that, in a hyperlinked age, we can do ever so much better than providing a “nut graph”, a single paragraph designed to put a complex breaking story into context. Instead, we can link to careful, thoughtful background material designed to give deep explanation a story and create an appetite for more breaking news on said story. (Jay’s post on the idea of the National Explainer is very much worth reading.)

To understand Erlinder and his arrest, one needs deep explainers on the Rwandan genocide, the prosecution of instigators, the role of the UK, US and France and on alternative narratives for what happened in 1994 and immediately before and after. I’m not able to offer those deep explanations, but I’ll point to what I’ve found.

The William Mitchell College of Law offers strong support for their arrested faculty member and points out that, “Prof. Erlinder exemplifies the great tradition of lawyers who take on the representation of unpopular clients and causes.” The president of the National Lawyers Guild – which Erlinder presided over from 1993-97 – uses similar language to defend Erlinder as “a vigorous advocate in his representation of [Victoire Ingabire].”

It’s not quite that simple. Erlinder isn’t just defending an opposition politician – he’s been a critic of the history of the 1994 conflict and an advocate for an explanation of the Rwandan genocide that puts a great deal of the blame on the shoulders of Paul Kagame. In a commentary in Jurist, a website from University of Pittsburgh’s School of Law, Erlinder argues that Kagame was responsible for triggering the genocide by arranging the assassination of Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyarimana and that Kagame’s troops killed tens of thousands of Hutu civilians in eastern Rwanda as they entered the country. He further asserts that a US/UK coverup has surpressed evidence about Kagame’s role in Habyarimana’s death, in part because the US wanted Kagame to take over the country and supported his rise to power. Some of what Erlinder asserts is consonant with an emerging understanding of what occurred in 1994 – human rights activist Alison Des Forges, who wrote what is considered the definitive account of the Rwandan genocide before her untimely death, had also criticized Kagame’s RPF for massacres of civilians in 1994 and for subsequent attacks on civilians and refugees in DRCongo… she had been banned from entering the country by the Kagame government. Other of Erlinder’s assertions – the US/UK coverup, notably – are strongly disputed. Erlinder attributes some of what he asserts about the coverup to Clinton administration official J. Brian Atwood, who strongly disputes Erlinder’s account of events.

Erlinder’s case relies on documents he had access to as a defense attorney at the international tribunal, on the unpublished Gersony Report, which (allegedly – the report has never been released and the author refuses to discuss the contents) reported attacks by Kagame’s RPF on civilians, and on statements from Carla Del Ponte, the outspoken ICTR prosecutor who raised questions about Kagame’s role in the 1994 genocide before complaints from the Kagame government led to her replacement. (The Rwandan government complained that prosecution of perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide was too important to be a part time job for a European prosecutor also tasked with prosecuting Yugoslav war criminals. Del Ponte believed that she was removed from the post when she announced her intention to prosecute Kagame.) The Rwanda Documents Project, an online archive of legal documents and opinion pieces from Professor Erlinder, offers an introduction to Erlinder’s arguments and supporting documents.

When I refer to Erlinder’s “case”, I mean that literally. Erlinder and other lawyers attempted to serve President Kagame with a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of the widows of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira when Kagame gave the commencement address at Oklahoma Christian University.

In other words, Erlinder had to know he’d be arrested when he came to Rwanda. The open question was whether his arrest would a) cause a diplomatic rift between the US and Rwanda, b) draw attention to Rwanda’s repressive speech and political environment and c) open discussion about the “received history” of the Rwanda genocide. So far, only b) seems to be coming into play. The Wall Street Journal wrote a helpful, if dismissive, editorial about Erlinder’s arrest, which advocates for his release while noting that: “Mr. Erlinder’s views seem foolish, offensive, and ultimately unhelpful to the cause of liberty he claims to champion. But therein lies the test of the free society: Tolerance of the foolish, the offensive, and even the unhelpful.” In other words, they’re putting Erlinder in the same bin as John Yettaw. (As of today, the US State Department has stated that they’re aware of Erlinder’s arrest, but said nothing beyond that statement.)

An “explainer” that puts Erlinder’s actions and motivations in context is no easy thing to provide. It needs to address the current elections, Rwanda’s political and speech environment, the conduct of the RPF in taking over the country in 1994, and, ultimately, the controversy over Habyarimana’s assassination. For a sense for just how fraught that last topic is, it’s instructive to look at this section on Wikipedia – it offers links to the three major theories offered for the assassination, which blame Hutu extremists, Kagame and the RPF and the French government. Each theory has its supporters, and the RPF/Kagame theory that Erlinder supports has the backing of French anti-terrorist magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, who has issued arrest warrants for senior Kagame officials so they can be questioned about he case. (Needless to say, the Rwandan government and others cite reports that contradict Bruguière’s findings.)

Is Erlinder an unhelpful fool, as the WSJ asserts? A conspiracy theorist, as the Rwandan government alleges? A brave activist committed to uncovering the truth and righting an important historical wrong? Perhaps this is where we have to accept the limits of journalism and wait for the verdict of historians. BBC journalist Marc Doyle suggests that determining who assassinated Habyarimana could be “one of the great mysteries of the late 20th Century.” But if we’re going to understand Erlinder’s arrest, we need someone to explain, at minimum, the controversy and what Rwanda’s – and eventually, the US’s – reaction means.

I didn’t mean to write about Professor Erlinder this week – there’s far too much I’ve got unwritten at the moment. But I’ve been following Rwanda’s crackdown on journalistic and political speech closely, because I’m fascinated by the ways in which Rwanda looks dramatically different through different lenses. I’d hoped I could answer a simple question for myself in doing a few hours reading: did I think Erlinder was a misguided crank, or a brave activist? I still don’t have a good answer, and I now have the sense that answering the question for myself would require weeks of reading, not just answers.

While I can’t answer the Erlinder question, I’ll offer a closing observation on Rwanda’s media environment. I’ve been trying to follow the Rwandan government’s reaction to Erlinder’s trip to Kigali. It’s made almost impossible by the fact that Rwanda’s national news agency publishes its reports under a subscription service. While the subscription is free (as in beer), it evidently requires human review and perhaps some scrutiny – I applied for access on Friday and haven’t heard back yet, which means my attempts to read Rwandan government responses are generally met with “Login denied! Your account has either been blocked or you have not activated it yet.” Not exactly the response you’d hope to get from a government news agency in a free and open society. As Sarah Boseley notes in an excellent article written for the Guardian – and filed from within Kigali – the Kagame government is much less interested in human rights – and international opinion – than it is in stability and growth.

Is the internet making us more partisan?

This is one of the most persistent debates in the study of cyberspace. Cass Sunstein, legal scholar, author and now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote Republic.com in 2002, which made the case that the Internet would lead us to cocoon ourselves in information that confirmed our suspicions, opinions and beliefs. He’s developed the argument further in a Republic.com 2.0, Infotopia (my review here) and Going to Extremes.

There are (at least) three pieces to Sunstein’s argument. First, he asserts that the internet makes it easier to surround yourself with comfortable information – and predicts that Americans are headed rapidly towards a cocooned future. Second, he posits that deliberation with like-minded individuals tends to drive us towards more extreme positions than we originally held. Third, he suggests that we could make small changes in our media environment to “nudge” ourselves towards more diverse, inclusive views of the world. (Some parts of his argument are better developed than others – I think his case that like-minded deliberation tends to polarize us is quite convincing, while I haven’t found his nudges all that compelling.)

Is Sunstein right that we’re becoming more isolated? There’s a whole cottage industry in academia dedicated to confirming or challenging his assertions. Adamic and Glance’s “Divided They Blog” saw little interlinking between bloggers on the left and right as they discussed the 2004 US presidential elections. Eszter Hargittai looked closely at the links between bloggers in “Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers” and discovered that when bloggers link across ideological lines, it’s often to create “straw man” versions of their arguments. Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides present evidence that suggests that blog readers are as politically polarized as members of Congress, a group that’s far more partisan than an average group of Americans. In the other corner, John Horrigan, Paul Resnick and Kelly Garrett found evidence that internet users had broader exposure to political arguments than non-users. (I offer my critique of the Horrigan, Resnick and Garrett paper here, relying on the Farrell et al paper for counterarguments. Dr. Garrett was good enough to engage with me in the comment thread, and her points are helpful in understanding the issues at hand and the difficulty of answering these questions.)

So here’s the latest paper designed to settle the debate… or perhaps throw more fuel on the fire. In “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline“, a working paper for the National Bureau of Economics Research from Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro (both of UChicago’s Booth School of Business”, the authors make the case that “ideological segregation on the Internet is low in absolute terms” and that there is no evidence that this segregation is increasing.

The paper, published about a month ago, attracted widespread attention in part because New York Times columnist David Brooks used the paper to present a downright cyberutopian take on the internet and ideological segregation: “If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.”

Slate magazine took the Brooks column and declared “we aren’t nearly as isolated as we think”… and built a tool to prove it. Visit their site, click a button and they’ll access your browser cookies to see what sites you’ve looked at and calculate your ideological isolation index. (This tells us at least as much about the sorry state of web security and privacy as it actually does about partisanship.)

I’m very interested in this issue, so I read the Gentzkow and Shapiro paper. And then I read it again, because I wasn’t sure I was reading the same paper that Brooks and others were reading.

Here’s what Gentzkow and Shapiro did – working with internet marketing firm comScore, they looked at the behavior of comScore panelists during 2009, when they visited sites that the company classifies as “General News” or “Politics”. That gave them data on the comparative popularity of each site. They used another set of data from comScore where panelists are asked their political preferences (ranging from very liberal to very conservative) and were able to calculate the ideological distribution for readers of 119 large sites in the news and politics set. Using this, they are able to estimate that 98% of viewers of rushlimbaugh.com identify as conservative, while only 19% of viewers of moveon.org do.

While that seems to support Sunstein’s contention of a polarized media, the authors discover that most readers spend time on a variety of sites, and spend a lot of time on sites that have a less polarized audience – general news sites like aolnews.com, Yahoo News, MSNBC or CNN. When you look at the span of sites the average conservative user views, the audience of those sites is 60.6% conservative – that’s an audience similar to the audience for usatoday.com. Across the span of sites the average liberal visits, the audience for those sites is 53.1% conservative. The “isolation index” – the difference between those figures – is 7.5, a figure the authors tell us is “small in absolute terms”.

It’s that characterization that I find confusing: small compared to what? The authors go on to calculate isolation indices for other media, using data from the Mediamark Research and Intelligence Survey, which asks 51,000 respondents about their media consumption and political orientation. They calculate similar isolation indices for other media, using data from the 2007 and 2008 Mediamark Research and Intelligence Survey of the American Consumer – again, they measure the percentage of conservative viewership for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC and Bloomberg cable news, then calculate the mean audiences for the sites that liberals view versus those that conservatives view. The isolation index is 3.3 in cable news, implying that liberals and conservatives have pretty similar media diets… and that ideological isolation is at least twice as high online (“in absolute term”, to use the language of the authors) as in cable news, which many commentators have decried for its partisan tone.

Indeed, the internet shows more ideological isolation than any other media the study considers – local newspapers, national magazines, broadcast television, cable television – other than a set of national newspapers, which includes only three: USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ideological isolation between readers of those three papers is 10.4, higher than the figure the authors calculate for visitors to internet news sites. (Ideological isolation online would be higher than in national newspapers if we exclude the largest two sites – AOL News and Yahoo News – from the set. Remove these very popular sites and ideological isolation online expands to 11.3. You might choose to remove these because they – as well as MSN – are often set as the default homepages for browsers provided by internet service providers. If we’re trying to measure the isolation of media people choose, we might remove this from the set… and the authors do so in section 7.3 to calculate this higher figure.)

So how do Gentzkow and Shapiro assert that ideological segregation is “small in absolute terms”? Well, it is… in comparison to how ideologically isolated people perceive themselves to be in their day to day interactions. They use the “Number Known” module of the 2006 General Social Survey to estimate the ideological diversity of people’s neighbors co-workers, acquaintances through social organizations, family and “people you trust”. Basically, they’re asking a respondent to characterize how many liberals or conservative she knows in these different groups and calculating ideological isolation from these perceptions.

Turns out that we perceive ourselves to be surrounded by folks who agree with us. In particular, we report a high ideological isolation index with our trusted friends (30.3), families (24.3), neighborhoods (18.7) and coworkers (16.8). Of course, it’s not clear that what we’re perceiving is actually reality – using data from the MRI survey, the authors calculate ideological isolation by county (5.9, lower than the calculated online isolation) and zip code (9.4, higher than online ideological isolation, lower than the national newspaper figure.) The disparity between neighborhoods and zipcodes illustrates the difficulty of using these two different methodologies – people perceive their neighbors as being quite ideologically similar (18.7 ideological isolation), but examining folks in their zipcode – as measured by their actual political ideology – leads to a low isolation index (5.9) which implies fairly high ideological diversity.

What these results mean is that the authors are able to present an attractive chart – Figure 2 – where the internet is smack dab in the middle of a distribution which moves from low ideological isolation (most media), moderate isolation (actual geographic distribution of political opinion, internet and national newspapers) and high isolation (percieved ideology of friends, family and coworkers). Does this mean that the internet isn’t especially ideologically isolated. Or are we comparing apples to oranges?

I think the comparison between ideological isolation in media and in face to face encounters is more like comparing apples and hedgehogs. They’re thoroughly different types of interactions and we should have very different expectations for diversity and ideological isolation in each set. The media I consume damn well better be more diverse than the community I live in. That’s what media is supposed to do – give me a broader view than I’m able to get from friends, family and coworkers. It’s okay that there aren’t any Thai people in my rural American town of 3,000, but if there are no Thai protests in my newspaper, there’s something wrong. Whether you live in Lanesboro, Los Angeles or Lagos, you need news media that’s more diverse – in terms of geography, ideology, national origin, religion, language – than your immediate surroundings so you can understand an interconnected world.

Media provides another critical social function beyond informing us about a diverse range of people and issues – it gives us common ground on which we can have conversations. It’s become commonplace in media criticism to remember a past in which Americans watched one of three broadcast networks and where we could expect to discuss what we saw with coworkers the next day. With hundreds of cable channels, we lose that cultural common ground, they posit. The results here seem to suggest that we’re even more fragmented and sorted in online spaces than we are as cable viewers. If you’re talking with someone at the water cooler about the article you both read on the BBC’s website, you can be pretty assured you’re both liberal (the site’s visitors are 72% liberal)… and given that BBC’s site has a daily US audience of 472,000 – reported by comScore – you’re not too likely to find a third coworker who’s read the same story.

Gentzkow and Shapiro do a thorough job of disassembling a straw man – a straw Sunstein, to be specific. They are able to demonstrate that Sunstein’s strongest assertions – “people restrict themselves to their own point of view – liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis” – are demonstrably false. The right reads Bill O’Reilly, the left reads Think Progress, but we all check Yahoo News. This isn’t necessarily because we’re seeking a common ground for understanding – it might just be because we’re all looking for sports scores.

The authors write: “One could imagine a news site that presented the Neo-Nazi perspective on all of the day’s events: first hand Neo-Nazi reports from a hurricane in Florida, a Neo-Nazi perspective on the Superbowl, and so forth. But such a site does not exist, to our knowledge, likely because the Neo-Nazi audience is too small to make such an investment worthwhile, and the preferences of Neo-Nazis for many stories are not actually all that different from those of the average consumer.”

So, yes – Sunstein overstates his case when he predicts that we’ll reach a future where we’re fully ideologically cocooned – the broad reach of general interest news aggregators ensures that they’ll have an audience with a diverse range of conservative and liberal readers. But I’d argue that Sunstein is right in spirit, especially as we move down the long tail of attention distribution. The isolation index in news sites ranked 1-10 and 11-20 by audience is 6.2 and 5.8 respectively. But the index for sites ranked 50 or lower is 21.3, implying very large differences between liberal and conservative audiences. As the authors note: “The most conservative sites are billoreilly.com, rushlimbaugh.com, and glennbeck.com, all personal sites of conservative radio or television hosts. We estimate these sites’ visitors to be more than 98 percent conservative.”

In other words, there are the sort of highly partisan websites Sunstein worries about. It’s just that their audiences are much smaller than the audience of aggregation sites… in part because Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow don’t yet cover all the news we’d like to encounter. The good news is that some of the people who access these highly partisan sites also read quite widely – the authors discovered that readers of Stormfront (a white supremicist website) were twice as likely to read The New York Times as the average user in their set. That, in turn, raises the question: “Are the Stormfront readers engaging with the New York Times content in the hopes of broadening their worldview, or are they merely keeping a watchful eye on the enemy?”

So here’s my summary of the Gentzkow and Shapiro paper… a slightly different set of conclusions than those put forward by Brooks and others:

- Internet news sites are highly ideologically isolated when compared to other sets of media – local newspapers, broadcast and cable television and magazines. The only media studied that are more ideologically isolated than internet news sites are the major national newspapers, which are widely perceived to be partisan.

- While a small number of popular internet sites have low ideological isolation, smaller internet sites tend to be highly polarized, showing much higher ideological isolation than any other media in the study.

- As the state, ideological isolation online doesn’t appear to be increasing over time… but that’s likely because new internet users are more likely to gravitate to the large, centrist sites like Yahoo and AOL News. Early adopters of the internet included many extremists, who saw the possibility of connecting with the like-minded online. Whether this pattern towards the center continues now that internet adoption is slowing is unclear.

I’ll offer two possible inferences that likely differ from Brooks’s position as well:

- Internet news sites and national newspapers show roughly as high ideological segregation as real-world communities (zip code, county statistics) do. This is disturbing, as we expect media to provide us with a common ground for conversations and to provide us with information from outside of our geographic, ideological, national and other biases. Instead, this finding suggests that we’re sorting ourselves towards partisan media much as Bill Bishop asserts we’re sorting ourselves in physical space… remarkable, as it’s much easier visit a website representing a different community than it is to move your household to another zipcode.

- As media becomes more personalized – through voting sites like Digg and Reddit, as well as through less formal mechanisms, like being forwarded links from friends via email or Facebook – we should expect ideological isolation to increase. That’s because we’re likely to have higher degrees of ideological isolation within our various peer groups than in society as a whole, and our friends are likely to display a selection bias in the news they pass to us.

Perhaps this is why I found Paul Carr’s reaction to this paper so satisfying. Carr reacts to the optimistic framing of the Gentzkow and Shapiro paper – and to the larger idea of a post-racial United States – somewhat bluntly:

The trend, according to champions of Internet diversity, is clear: the Internet makes us less fearful of people with different ideologies, backgrounds or skin colours to our own. And this, of course, is A Good Thing. In just a generation, laws like that passed in Arizona or opinions like that expressed to Prime Minister Brown in Rochdale will be a thing of the past and, thanks to social media, we’ll all live together in perfect harmony. Ebony and Ivory, etc etc etc. In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s just one problem with that vision of Christmas yet to come…

It’s total horseshit.

His argument is in part from anecdote – his surprise at a hotel worker’s strike in San Francisco, which he hadn’t heard about as it was discussed mostly in Spanish-language media. But his strongest example has some hard data behind it. Carr observes, “Twitter feels like one of the whitest sites in the world to me: full as it is with self-important middle-class hipster kids retweeting New York Times stories and the fact that they’re having sushi for lunch.” But a recent report from Edison Research, who surveyed US consumers about their awareness and use of Twitter (landline and mobile phone sampling, 1,753 interviews), found that 25% of American twitter users are African-American… roughly twice the percentage of African-Americans found in the US population. The survey found heavy Hispanic usage as well, and noted that only 51% of survey respondents identified as “white”.

This was a surprise to Carr because his Twitter – the people he follows – are self-important white kids. Watch the trending topics and you’ll end up with a different picture – the most popular hashtags are often started by African American teens, using the space in a very different, more conversational manner than many white users. danah boyd talked about this phenomenon in her talk at SXSW 2010 about social media and inclusion: “As one black user explained to me, joking around on Twitter is a lot like an extension of ‘yo mamma’ culture; it’s a place to blow off steam with humor that is sometimes vulgar in nature.”

If that’s not your experience of Twitter, it’s a function of who you follow. Like most of us, Carr’s network includes a lot of people he shares demographic similarities with. (The phenomenon is called “homophily”, and I’ve already written too much about it. Here’s one of the key papers in the field, if you’re interested in reviewing the academic literature…) It wouldn’t be surprising to discover that the majority of the people he follows share his political views. And as tools like Twitter become more important for sharing news, it’s more likely that Carr will get little news from the African-American and Latino communities and more that’s consonant with his politics.

Gentzkow and Shapiro’s work suggests that we shouldn’t worry too much about Twitter as homophily trap. After all, many more internet users get their information from fairly centrist news aggregation sites than from Twitter or Facebook. But that may be changing. Jane Buckingham, the founder of media research organization, the Intelligence Group, quoted a college student she interviewed as saying, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Brian Stelter, writing in the New York Times two years back, saw that statement as descriptive of a generation of media users who rely more on “social filters” than on mainstream media. If Stelter’s right, then the reassurance Gentzkow and Shapiro offer – for what it’s worth – may not be valid for very long.

I have friends on the right and the left of the US political spectrum who are skeptical of Sunstein’s arguments about the internet and partisanship. What those friends have in common is a passionate and abiding love of the internet. I share that love, and I believe that the internet, overall, has made my life (and that of many of the people I know), more global, connected and diverse than it would have been in a pre-digital age.

The reason to take serious, critical looks at scholarship about the internet and diversity – ideological and otherwise – is that we should be passionately committed to ensuring that the internet helps make the world wider, not smaller. If research shows evidence of increasing isolation online, it’s a call to action to make sure we’re building tools and infrastructures that make it possible to connect beyond our existing circles of friends and to ensure that we’re getting the information we need to live in this wide and connected world.

I had the good fortune to catch a small part of a conference at Harvard yesterday on text analysis. Good fortune, because I was there long enough to hear Justin Grimmer‘s talk on his dissertation, Measuring Reputation Outside Congress. Grimmer is interested in an important – and tough to answer – question: how responsive are the people we elect to their constituents?

We could look for ways to answer this question by studying the voting record of legislators (qualitatively or quantitatively), examining their work in Washington (through Congressional literature) or through examining their communications with constituents at home. This latter set of questions is referred to as the “Home Style” of a politician, following the work of Richard Fenno (1978).

Home style tells us something about politicians that their voting record often doesn’t, Grimmer tells us. He invites us to compare Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Richard Shelby (also R-Alabama). If we consider them simply in terms of their voting behavior, they look nearly identical – they vote together the vast majority of the time and both can be described, in voting terms, as conservative republicans.

But anyone who knows Alabama politics will tell you that Sessions and Shelby are vastly diferent guys. Grimmer characterizes Session as “an intense policy guy” who will bore you to tears with incredibly long, thorough explanations of issues when all you wanted was a photo with him. Shelby, on the other hand, is all about bringing home the bacon… and there are Shelby Halls at two Alabama universities to prove it.

Evidence suggests that representational style – policy versus pork, heavy versus light communicators – cuts across party lines. And it’s likely that politicians have diverse, stable, nonpartisan home styles. If we can find ways to characterize these differences – Grimmer proposes studying the difference in communications with constituents that claim credit and those that discuss policy – we have the opportunity to compare across senators, and connect these differences to what senators do within the institutions of power.

When Fenno studied the “home style” of politicians in 1978, he engaged in “soaking and poking” – intense participant observation, which involved following 18 members of Congress over 8 years. This method, Grimmer observes, is expensive, underrepresentative (and really hard to replicate as a graduate student.) Instead, we might study texts produced by senators. One candidate is newspaper articles… but editorial bias makes it hard to use editorials as representative of senatorial communications. We might use the constituent newsletters produced by Senate offices… but they’re sent using the constitutional Franking privleges and are very hard to get hold of.

Instead, Grimmer has been studying the press releases that senate offices produce – over 64,000 in all. The average senator issues 212 press releases per year, and while the quantity produced has a wide range (some produce only a few dozen, while Hillary Clinton’s senate office produced over a thousand a year), there’s no strong correlation between political party and usage of the tool.

After collecting the releases, Grimmer used machine learning techniques to separate transcripts of floor statements (which are usually released as press releases) from pure press releases, which let him study how a senator chooses to speak to her constituents. Once that sorting has taken place, the task is pretty simple – determine the topic of a press release. This is simplified by the fact that congressional aides try hard to ensure that press releases are on a single topic.

Grimmer’s work clusters senators by the topics discussed in their press releases. His research reveals four basic clusters:

- Senate Statespersons. These folks speak like they’re running for president… and they may well be. Their releases discuss the Iraq war, intelligence issues, international relations and budget issues. John McCain’s office communicates this way.

- Domestic policy. These senators are also policy wonks, but their focus is domestic – the environment, gas prices, DHS, and consumer safety.

- Pork and policy – Communication from these senators includes discussions of water rights grants, but also has serious discussion of health and education policy. Sometimes this is because the office simply issues lots and lots of releases – (former) Senator Clinton’s office fits in this camp.

- Appropriators – These guys communicate about the grants they’ve won – fire grants, airport grants, money for universities, and for police departments.

As well as clustering press releases based on topic, Grimmer’s work considers another metric – how often a press release claims credit for an appropriation. There turns out to be a vast spectrum, ranging from John McCain, who basically only issues statements about policy, and a guy like Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, where virtually every press release claims credit for an appropriation. There’s a very strong correlation between the topic clusters in releases and the percentage of releases claiming credit. (That’s at least in part because claiming credit is one of the topic clusters – you’re correlating between, in part, the same factor. Interesting nevertheless.)

What’s most interesting is that this classification – either by type of politician or by their place on the credit spectrum – is tightly correlated to their voting behavior on a particular issue: votes on appropriations rules, or as Grimmer puts it, “How do legislators self-regulate the porkbarrel”. These votes aren’t partisan – the late Ted Kennedy voted with Richard Shelby on these sorts of votes, which suggests truth to the truism that there are three parties in Congress: Democrats, Republicans and Appropriators. In other words, the way a Senator communicates with constituents is strongly predictive of their legislative behavior, specifically on how they allocate funds.

I thought this was excellent stuff – I hadn’t seen someone take a large database of political communications and subject it to automated analysis, and I thought the demonstration of this “third party” was particularly compelling.

• BTS | December 2009 Airline Traffic Data: System Traffic Down 0.6 Percent from December 2008
  Data on international, domestic air traffic in the US – 7 times as many domestic flights on US carriers than international… I would have expected higher numbers…
  (tags: airplane airport travel data statistics globalization)
• NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation
  Excellent Paul Carr essay on internet echo chambers. Strong examples of how we can self segregate, and a very interesting observation on racial divides on Twitter.
  (tags: immigration internet race racism socialmedia twitter opinion echochambers)

Dr. Miriam Meckel is a fellow at the Berkman Center this year, and is Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Her lunch talk at Berkman Tuesday looked at the changing relationship between journalism and social media, through a case study of a journalist – Robert Mackey – and his use of Twitter during the Iran revolution. Her interest in the topic is personal as well as academic – as a journalist for fifteen years, she characterizes herself as “frustrated by the discussions around social media and journalism,” which often cover the same, familiar ground.

To contextualize this research, Meckel points to the ongoing interest in the relationship between journalism and social media, citing James Fallows’s “How to Save the News” in the Atlantic, which points out that Google might actually help to save journalism, at least in part because they rely on journalists’ efforts. She references a finding that 70% of journalists use social networks for reporting, and wonders whether journalism can survive a world in which the price for words – referencing a recent Sunday New York Times article – could be as low as $10 for an article.

Meckel’s literature review suggests that academics are hard at work on a discourse of “saving journalism” in a networked future. She quotes papers that assert that online journalists have “not yet received parity” with their traditional peers and that bloggers continue to be heavily reliant on offline reporting. Meckel questions this, arguing that bloggers are now setting the agenda in the online space. She wonders whether this pushback is a reflection of a widespread fear on the part of journalists (and some academics) about the weakening of journalist authority.

What could we empirically prove about journalism and social media, Meckel asks? She and her team decided to examine the use of Twitter by a professional journalist during the Iranian green revolution election protests. This was a period of especially high interest in Twitter, as international news organizations had been banned from covering protests directly. (See my recent article in Daedalus, which argues that this need to embrace citizen media was a turning point in the relationship between traditional journalism and citizen media.) Specifically, she and her team looked closely at Robert Mackey, a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times and the Guardian, and who maintains a blog for the Times called The Lede. She identifies Mackey as one of a small number of journalists celebrated for their work in “pulling information out of the social media ecosystem.”

Examining Mackey’s role in building links between Twitter and the world of professional journalism allow us to as certain quantifiably-answerable questions:
- How can we frame influence in a social media environment?
- What role do journalists take in a new media ecosystem?
- Is there evidence of an intermediary function of journalists?

The theoretical framework that informs Meckel’s work includes older – Katz and Lazarfeld’s work on the two-step model of influence and newer models from network science, including theories that center on “information brokerage”. Meckel’s work considers Mackey in these terms, asking:

- Which Twitter accounts refer to Iran, in general?
- How is Mackey linked to these accounts?
- How does he forward this information?
- Which readers are interested in Iran?
- How is Mackey connecting sources in Iran to his readership?

Between June 7-26th, 2009, her team collected 2 million Iran-focused tweets from 480,000 accounts. They selected the 200 most active users, and filtered that set down to the 100 most “relevant” users talking about the protests. Their analysis of The Lede suggests that Mackey chose 12 highly relevant Iran sources accessible on Twitter and relied heavily on them as sources. “Almost 60% of (51) iran related blog entries show mentions of Twitter users as sources.”

To determine whether Mackey’s readers were interested in this topic, she analyzed the Twitter streams of his followers, looking for Iran-specific keywords. His followers included a mix of users who were uninterested, interested and extremely interested. What was particularly striking is that the most interested readers didn’t really need Mackey – they were following the sources he cited, and prefered to retweet them directly. But Mackey served as a useful bridge for people with some interest in Iran, but not sufficient interest to find the best sources themselves.

Mackey also served as a broker connecting his fellow journalists at the New York Times to Iran voices on Twitter. Meckel found at least two other Times journalists who served similar roles. Essentially, journalists appeared to work on the assumption that Mackey and colleagues were able to collect the most relevant information from Twitter and package it for use in more traditional journalistic stories.

Meckel acknowledges limitations of the research she’s done. There’s not much software developed to document webs of relationships in Twitter, and her team ended up doing a good bit of original development. The single case of Robert Mackey might be an interesting exemplar, or could be an outlier – she’s hoping to repeat the work, looking at a wider set of “Twitter brokers”. And she acknowledges that this research might document a moment in time, not necessarily a longer trend.

Still, she hopes the work support some larger ideas:

- Journalists have a different audience and can link between a social media audience and a news audience, serve as intermediaries and connectors between these spaces. The size of their online audience might not be as relevant as we think, because they’re most powerful as connectors.

- Journalists need to be interactive and involved with their online sources, and their readers, on social networking platforms. Their value comes from linking and amplifying information – applying value judgements to what they analyze – and their influence can be traced by retweets.

- Journalists draw on the reputation of their media institution. But this may change in a social media network. Instead, they need to develop an independent, individual reputation aside from their publication – a personal brand.

I was fascinated by Meckel’s talk, in part because I’m interested in brokerage as a model for bridging information imbalances – Global Voices can be thought of as a brokerage, bringing knowledge about the Ghanaian blogosphere, for instance, to a wider media audience.

But I also remembered that Robert Mackey and I crossed swords over his decision to amplify a rumor emerging from some Iranian bloggers that imprisoned blogger and activist Hossein Derakshan was cooperating with Iranian authorities. I wrote an angry post on my blog, accusing Mackey of violating journalistic ethics in amplifying an unverified (and untrue) rumor. He was gracious about engaging with me, and though we disagreed about his actions, the exchange we had in the comment thread was one of the most honest, transparent and civil exchanges I’ve had in criticizing a journalist’s work, and I’m grateful to Mackey for his willingness to engage.

Meckel’s work suggests that figures like Mackey are extremely powerful, not just in linking less-engaged readers to online content, but in bridging between social media and the journalists within the New York Times. Her analysis suggests that Mackey may be working with a small set of sources – she suggests 12 key figures – and that his source selection is extremely important in determining what gets covered.

I’ve observed – in my recent article and elsewhere – that the picture one takes of the Green Revolution protests can look very different depending on what languages you speak. The movement leaders communicate very well in English, and the diasporans who support the movement tend to be English speakers, while Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be more comfortable writing in Persian. Meckel confirmed that Mackey’s sources were writing in English. Was he getting a sufficiently diverse view of the opinions on the ground? Is it possible to get a diverse view without reading Persian? The source who accused Derakshan of collaborating the government was writing in English from Switzerland – some of Mackey’s sources were in the diaspora, removed from events on the ground by the need to avoid arrest in Tehran. Is the picture we’re getting through a broker like Mackey systematically biased?

I should note – this isn’t a question about Mackey personally. (While we haven’t met, I admire the man’s work and appreciate his willingness to engage online.) It’s a question about the biases that come from citizen media, from brokerage and from journalism as an enterprise. For instance – Global Voices is covering the Red Shirt protests in Thailand right now. While I think Mong Palatino is doing an excellent job, he’s constrained by the fact that the Reds tend to be poorer and more rural than the Yellows, and are less likely to use citizen media… much like the pro-Ahmedinejad forces in Iran.

The hope is that citizen media is complementing experienced correspondents on the ground who speak the language and understand the culture. The discussion at Berkman in the wake of Meckel’s talk centered on the role of the foreign correspondent – I offered my friend Solana Larsen’s contention that foreign correspondents are going to disappear, and we’re going to learn to rely on domestic correspondents writing for a global audience. I don’t know that this will happen quickly, and I worry that these voices may draw less attention than traditional foreign correspondents, but I think simple economics means Solana’s right in the mid to long term.

Mackey, essentially, is acting as a foreign correspondent with Twitter as his beat. He’s not deeply rooted in Iran – he’s deeply rooted in the new world of social media. I think this is a transitional phenomena – in a few years, whoever’s writing about Iran for the New York Times will simply use Twitter and blogs as another input into their work. In the meantime, this bridging function is likely quite useful. But it’s extremely powerful, and potentially distorting, and we need to look at all these brokers – including the one I’ve helped build and run – closely and carefully.

I just heard from Thomas Plotkowiak, the PhD student who’s been doing much of the work on analysing Twitter discussed in this post. He’s got an excellent blog focused on the challenges of data mining Twitter – very interesting reading for anyone interested in making sense out of the data available.

I’m just back from the Global Voices summit in Santiago, Chile. My headache hasn’t quite receded from the 970ml beers at 777 Alameda, but I had two flights and a long drive home to start processing the lessons of four days spent with dear friends from around the world – who happen to include some of the best minds in participatory media.

A breakout group at the GV summit, at the Santiago Public Library

We’ve thrown five summits so far, including our inception meeting at Harvard in 2004, and from each meeting, an informal theme has emerged. For me, the theme of GV Santiago was “love or money?” This isn’t a new question for most nonprofit organizations, or indeed, for anyone involved in citizen media. Money’s generally a lousy reason to start a nonprofit or to write a blog. But the issue is layered and nuanced, as I started to discover through our discussions about what makes Global Voices function.

For the past year, we’ve been considering an interesting problem that confronts media as a whole – the Babel problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, the internet is becoming more multilingual as people, organizations and publications from all over the world come online. If you, like me, are a mostly monolingual English speaker, you can read a smaller percentage of the Internet every day. And if you live in the US, the meltdown of advertising supported journalism means that you’re getting less coverage of international news… which means we might need to find ways to unlock important citizen or professional media coverage in Laotian or Latvian.

GV’s been a pioneer in this space. From early on, we’ve been translating blog posts from over thirty languages into English so they can reach a broader audience. For almost four years, we’ve been offering editions in languages other than English, relying on volunteers to translate articles they’re interested in and want to share with their language communities. The question we’ve been asking this past year: does it make sense to try to use Global Voices to translate other types of content?

There’s a mercenary aspect to this question, of course – if Global Voices could somehow be transformed into a translation services bureau, the resulting revenue could allow us to support more bloggers in disadvantaged communities, document more threats to freedom of speech online… or simply fly our friends to cool corners of the world more often than once every two years. But there’s a mission-driven reason as well – so long as translation is expensive and difficult for media outlets, they’re unlikely to feature views from people who don’t speak English (or whatever language their readers/listeners/viewers speak.)

Marc Herman, who’s been working hard on this issue for GV, provocatively offered this formulation: “How do mainstream media organizations deal with translation? They don’t.” I tweeted this comment and got immediate pushback from my friend Richard Sambrook, formerly director of BBC’s Global News division, who pointed out that BBC is now producing content in many languages and translating between them, incorporating views expressed in many languages. But BBC is the exception, not the rule – language is a barrier for many news outlets and can prevent local views and opinions from coming to light.

Given GV’s mission of amplifying voices that go unheard, it makes sense that we might consider helping media by translating local voices, especially in the context of breaking news. But GV’s also a volunteer driven organization – the vast majority of the people who produce our content aren’t compensated financially (more about this in a moment.) Volunteers aren’t always able to drop everything and translate comments for a breaking news story about an earthquake or a protest – if we wanted to offer this service to news outlets, it might make sense for us to compensate translators for their timely responses.

This idea – as well as the broader idea of offering money to people in the GV community translate content from, say, a Haitian Creole newspaper into English – brings up the apparent paradoxes around love and money that make GV work. It takes thousands of people to produce the content that shows up in a month’s worth of Global Voices, and only a couple dozen are compensated fiscally. We pay our full-time staff – our executive and managing directors, our managing editor, our technology director, our directors of advocacy and of the Rising Voices project – and we pay salaries that are badly below market rates and we don’t provide meaningful benefits. (Everyone is treated as a contractor, rather than as an employee.) Our editors, who are responsible for managing whole regions or languages worth of content (“North Africa and Middle East” is a region for Global Voices, but so is “Francophonia”) are paid $800 a month, with the expectation that they put roughly 20 hours a week into the job… in other words, slightly above the US minimum wage. We pay some of the coordinators of our lingua (translated) sites… but only the ones where we’ve been able to secure funding. The others volunteer… as do all the lingua translators and the authors who write posts about a particular post or issue, who collectively represent about 90% of our community. And we don’t compensate the bloggers, videographers, photographers, etc. whose content we feature on the site. (And no, we don’t pay board members either. :-)

We do compensate people in other ways. Authors and translators who are especially productive get invited to our biannual summits, and we pay for travel, hotels and a modest stipend for meals. This isn’t cheap – given the global distribution of our community, we’re not talking about bus tickets, but airfare from, say, Antananarivo to Santiago. Being featured on Global Voices can be a big boost for someone’s journalistic career, and we know of many people in our community who’ve leveraged experience with Global Voices into a paying job.

But most of the compensation is in love, not money. People work on Global Voices because it’s a chance to represent their community to the wider world, to show people the fascinating conversations taking place in their local blogospheres. They translate to preserve their language, to ensure that there’s content online in languages like Malagasy or Aymara, to share their work with friends and neighbors who don’t read English. They do it because they’ve fallen in love with the mission, or the people behind the project, or the joy of doing something more meaningful than what they do every day at work. (I heard a wonderful story from a GV editor who stayed at a miserable job longer than she should because it gave her a fast internet connection and a good opportunity to translate content for GV on company time.)

Given our surplus of love and surfeit of money, you’d think we might move towards a system where we ask people to do more for free and less for pay. But certain things are hard to buy without money. By paying a talented tech director, we make it possible for him to pay the rent without taking on other consulting gigs which would prevent him from answering our desparate phonecalls at 2am when the site goes down. And being able to spend money means we’re able to get contributions from parts of the world where there’s less of a culture of volunteering… or less ability for people to volunteer. GV based entirely on money would be untenable – it would cost millions a year, and be impossible to sustain. But GV based entirely on love would likely be unsustainable in its own ways – it would end up overly reliant on and representative of those who are lucky enough to not worry about money.

That’s the backdrop against which these conversations about money play out. I’d been interested in the idea of GV launching a translation service because I thought it would provide opportunities for our talented and undercompensated translators to make money using their skills. Several translators pushed back against the idea – they translate for GV because they’re fascinated by the content, because they enjoy choosing what they work on, because they’re able to take the time to do a careful, thorough, loving job. Adding money to that equation could – would? – break what works.

What happens when money comes into other corners of the GV world? Bernardo Parrella, editor of Global Voices in Italiano, has negotiated a deal where La Stampa, Turin’s largest newspaper, features Global Voices in Italian and pays a significant sum to GV to support reporting and translation. I was thrilled to hear about this deal. We’ve been fighting an uphill battle for over five years to get mainstream publications to feature our work – having a respected paper compensate us for our work as well as featuring it seemed like a huge step in the right direction.

Other members of the community disagreed. By offering our content to newspapers, aren’t we just letting papers lay off more staff who’d be dedicated towards international coverage? Is it fair for a organization that runs on money to rely on content produced by an organization that runs mostly on love?

Excellent questions. GV chose the most liberal of Creative Commons licenses – attribution (or BY) – because we wanted other media outlets to have as few barriers to entry as possible if they wanted to use our content. Rebecca and I were working on GV in part because we worried that international media coverage in American news outlets was poor and getting worse – we knew it was a struggle to get any (non-crisis) developing world stories into the media and didn’t want to put a payment barrier in front of La Stampa or anyone else who wanted to feature content from Madagascar or Morocco.

Was that the right decision? I don’t know. The closer I look at Global Voices through the lens of love and money, the more I realize I don’t know. It’s disconcerting, like looking at the insides of a piece of technology – the engine compartment of my truck, the innards of my laptop – that I rely on but don’t completely understand. I don’t get how the pieces all operate, so I’m reluctant to tinker with any of them. Instead, I close the lid and hope that everything keeps functioning smoothly.

If you want your truck to crank out more horsepower or to run on biodiesel, you’ve got to understand how the engine works, not just shut the hood and ignore it. There are aspects of GV that I wish ran better – I wish we were better at covering some parts of the world, better at having our content featured in mainstream publications, better at providing opportunities for the people whose love keeps our community going.

Understanding how to tune the engine of any organization that works on both love and money – and what organization doesn’t? – requires some deep understanding that I don’t yet have. I know it when I see it working: TED’s amazing translation project, producing 7,000 talks translated by 4,000 volunteers, including 70 languages – required a huge investment of money to build a technology infrastructure that now runs primarily on love. Wikipedia has used love to build the world’s largest encyclopedia… but has discovered that love alone doesn’t produce sufficient content in some of the world’s neediest corners. Now it’s trying to use the money that love has attracted to build out some of the smaller Wikipedias to serve huge populations of poor people.

Is there an organizational physics of love and money that could be discovered and documented? Can we experiment, sliding balls down inclined ramps until we understand the basic laws that let an organization succeed or fail? Or are love and money quantum effects, where experimentation and observation are bound to change the underlying phenomena?

So much I don’t understand. And so I close the lid and pray it just keeps working.

Elliot Maxwell, a fellow of the communications program at Johns Hoplins University, focuses his Berkman lunch talk on the impact of openness on wider issues of responsiveness of systems and processes. He suggests that we can think of openness as a lens through which we can analyze complex systems… but warns that openness can, itself, be hard to describe.

There’s a continuum from open to closed. If you never share an idea, it’s closed – if you publish it on the public web, it’s pretty open. Open source software is closer to the middle of the continuum than you might think – people make judgements about what goes into the Linux kernel, for instance. And Wikipedia is also not purely open, in his model. The question is: what’s the appropriate degree of openness for a specific system?

Watching a televised meeting of a town council on cable television is transparent, but not open – you can’t have an impact into the discussion taking place.

Openness is an attitude, not necessarily something that organically arises from new technological systems. We’re watching medicine change from a world in which doctors are god-like figures… to one where patients come to doctors with a sheaf of printouts. This is an attitude change, not just a technology change.

We can make the mistake of teaching openness as a religion. Health records help us think about an appropriate level of openness – we want these records open to us as patients, but perhaps not as open to insurers, employers or the government.

The traditional theory of intellectual property sees control as central to value creation and innovation. We may overemphasize the idea of original genius, and we’ve created an IP system that protects first creators, sometimes at the expense of follow-on creators. Giving original creators control allows them to exercise a temporary monopoly. Protecting that control is costly, and never perfect – DRM is a great example of the ways in which asserting that control can make things harder to use.

In the context of an open source license, we decide that we won’t control and restrict, and in exchange, we’ll benefit from the contributions of follow-on innovators. And it’s cheaper – because copying is far cheaper these days than preventing people from copying. The issue that emerges is how to filter and discover high quality material.

There’s lots of movements towards openness – Wikipedia, Public Library of Science, Craigslit, user-generated content. Maxwell has been researching openness in clinical trials. In general, the emphasis in clinical trials has been to be open as late as possible in the process. Companies see a competitive advantage in keeping trials closed so as not to tip their hands… but it’s important to know about failed clinical trials. Now clinical trials are registered when they begin at ClinicalTrials.gov, and information is shared to help people not make the same mistakes.

It’s peculiar that higher ed has been less effected by openness than other information-rich industries. (Entertainment, for instance, has been wholly transformed.) The frontier for openness in higher education is open educational resources, which can be customized, localized, translated and generally transformed in ways that are useful for different audiences. But because these materials can be so quickly manipulated and changed, it’s harder to evaluate what’s worthwhile. And there are open questions about the motivations for participation – what are the incentives to make contributions to the field?

There’s been excellent work, Maxwell tells us, at CMU and elsewhere to harvest the advantages of digital materials, including the possibility of realtime assesmebt and feedback integrated within the materials. This doesn’t mean we’d want to move solely to high-feedback digital systems, but a meta-study of education research suggests that “blended models” of online and offline study are working well.

The critical moment for Open Research was the Human Genome Project versus Celera, an open model versus a closed for decoding the human genome. At the end, both sides agreed “We all won”… but really, open won. We’re seeing much more open research because it’s leading to much more rapid innovation.

Historically, there’s a strong culture of recognition that helps scientific progress move forwards – the gold standard for your research is publication in a journal like “Nature”. But if you’re releasing data as you go, it becomes harder for Nature to accept your paper. We need new ways of doing digital peer review and evaluation to recognize this change.

We’ve made exceptions for educational use in the field of intellectual property. Those accomodations now need to recognize the impact of an open educational environment and accomodate not just original, but follow-on innovators in the space. This work includes educating faculty about their intellectual property rights.

The mission of a university is to disseminate knowledge. We need, Maxwell suggests, to re-evaluate Bayh-Dole, which gives universities intellectual property rights over their creations, and consider whether we benefit from locking these developments up with IP. It seems like there should be exceptions to these IP rights that ensure that vital medicines could be accessible in the developing world. We also should recognize that universities are responsible for creating lots of orphan works as well, and we don’t deal with orphaned works well under our current copyright regime.

What happens if we decide to change openness on universities, turning university events from default closed to default open? Maxwell would like to see university events open as a default, along with open source educational administrative software and increased openness of university support services.

There’s been a long battle for open access to government funded research. NIH led the pack with a mandate for public disclosure of funded research within 12 months in open access journals. This decision is now facing aggresive lobbying by the copyright industry, while the forces of openness are trying to extend the policy further than shorten the embargo. We could also imagine increasing open access mandates to any research related to government approval – research leading towards drugs that need FDA approval, for instance. We could also support open access journals by ensuring funding for researchers to publish in these venues, which generally require the author published to pay.

Maxwell offers as a final frontier the idea of transparency in educational degrees. How do we know what people know based on the degree they’ve been awarded? The EU’s had to deal with the problem because of increased cross-border mobility – how do we compare a Greek and UK degree? The europeans have worked out a common system – we could consider building a similar system for degrees in the US. Government accreditation requirements are more of a bare minimum – not a useful comparison between institutions, and so we end up with unhelpful comparators like US News and World Report.

This might lead us towards new means of certification in a global setting. State or national certifications might no longer be meaningful in a more globalized age.

Wendy Seltzer, who invited Maxwell to speak at Berkman, asks what’s the most valuable lever for openness? He suggests that we ask the President to reconsider a model where control inevitably leads to value and less control destroys value.

Rebecca MacKinnon and I led a conversation at the Global Voices public summit on the topic of “Internet Freedom”. I raised the idea that term “internet freedom” is so broad that it can end up being meaningless. Rebecca’s offered the wonderful idea that “internet freedom is a Rorschach test” – what someone sees in the term tells you more about them than it does about the subject.

I suggested that Internet Freedom could include everything from circumventing the Chinese firewall, to pressuring US web companies to protect online speech, to advocating for network neutrality. And then our room full of international bloggers, advocates, activists, government officials and businesspeople proceeded to explode my tentative definition of internet freedom and demonstrate just how huge the field potentially is.

Sami ben Gharbia, dear friend, Global Voices Advocacy director and provocateur par excellence, started things off with a bang by offering one of the hardest challenges to the internet freedom field. He suggests that the money coming into the internet freedom field from governments could present a threat to activists who accept their support. His concern is rooted in cases of organizations like Hamas executing “collaborators” based on their receipt of fiscal support from the US. Sami suggests a need to warn activists about these dangers and ensure they make informed decisions, rather than simply accepting potentially dangerous internet freedom funds. He offers a second challenge – if the US is interested in promoting internet freedom, why such a strong focus on Iran and China, and not on Vietnam, Mauritania or Tunisia? Is internet freedom really just another way of projecting national priorities by the US state department?

I asked Sami whether there was any way he thought the US government could have a beneficial influence in the internet freedom space. His blunt answer: “No. I’d prefer they stay out of the field.”

Bob Boorstin, good friend, Director of Corporate and Policy Communication at Google, former US government official and skilled rhetorical combatant, isn’t buying Sami’s framing of the issues. He worries that Sami’s frame is “paranoid”, and suggests that any country’s foreign policy is going to recognize the importance of some countries over others. “We pay more attention to countries with nuclear weapons than to those that don’t.” Asked what he’d like to see the US government doing, Bob wants agreement between democracies to disclose precisely what they block and censor, and wants the US to use a trade barrier framework to fight against censorship.

Much of the dialog centered on the idea of a statement of internet rights. A group in Brazil, one of our discussants tells us, is leveraging a successful campaign against an internet filtering law and now working on collaboratively authoring an internet bill of rights. Robert Guerra of Freedom House worries that an independent internet bill of rights ignores the fact that there’s already protections for online speech in Article XIX of the universal declaration of human rights. Cyrus Farivar helpfully points out that countries like Iran have signed the Universal Declaration but don’t respect or protect those rights – why would we think they’d respect a new declaration? Muhammad Karim suggests a creative commons model for internet freedom – a core of basic principles which could be adapted to be consonant with local laws.

The legal complications of internet freedom aren’t restricted to declarations of freedom of speech – they include trade and commerce laws as well. Jillian York reminds us that US sanctions prevent users in Syria from downloading key pieces of software – we need to freedoms throughout the legal framework, not just in terms of freedom of speech.

But internet freedom is bigger than the realm of law and policy. One of our conference guests introduces himself as an anarchist and argues that networks that the users don’t own aren’t free. He’d like to see us supporting mesh networking, creating physical networks that aren’t owned by corporate internet service providers. I pointed out that corporations are controlling most of our critical online “public spaces”.

But Lova Rakotomalala broadened the space more than anyone else, arguing that, if we consider internet freedom to be a human right, the struggle to protect that right needs to consider access as well. In a country like his native Madagascar, protecting speech online is a small part of the problem – extending internet to the 98% of the community that has no access is a much more challenging struggle.

How big is internet freedom? It’s big – perhaps too big to fit in the space of one discussion. But the breadth of framings for this issue at GV gives me great confidence that we’re doing a good job of creating a “big room” in which we can share these perspectives. I felt like this conversation started showing me where the walls of that room might be.

To close the first day at the Global Voices 2010 summit, Bob Boorstin from Google and Ivan Sigal of Global Voices announce the Breaking Borders award. We’re inaugurating the award this year, which offers $10,000 grants to projects and individuals that support freedom of expression, recognizes it as a fundamental human right and connects freedom of expression to governance. Google and Thompson Reuters are providing support for the award, and Global Voices and Google have convened a jury to select the recipients.

Boorstin notes that forty countries are currently censoring the internet – “As far as Google is concerned, that’s forty countries too many.” Ivan Sigal notes that the award helps commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and connects the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of internet culture. He challenges us to build the internet we want, not accept the internet we have.

Ivan explains our process: there was an open call for nominations beginning in December. Organizations could self-nominate, and over 300 applied. A jury – including Bob Boorstin, Dean Wright of Reuters, Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices, Sheila Coronel of the Columbia Journalism School, Edetaen Ojo from Media Rights Agenda in Nigeria, Jose Roberto De Toledo, the founder of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism – selected three winners for the inaugural class. They include:

-Bosco, from Uganda (in the technology category). It’s a solar powered, long-range computer network in IDP camps in northern Uganda. The jury cited Archbishop John Baptist Odama for incredible technical creativity in bringing the voices of people affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army with the wider world.

Archbishop Odama points out that northern Uganda has been at war for 23 years and has therefore been separated from the wider world. The Archbishop felt strongly that the project couldn’t just build connections locally – they needed to be global and, therefore, needed to embrace the internet. This mean demystifying the “magic box” of the computer and making it a transparent tool for communication.

- The Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism, represented by executive director Malou Mangahas, receives the “policy” award from Breaking Borders. Boorstin points out that PCIJ isn’t exactly new to the scene – they’ve been working since 1989 to build a culture of investigative journalism in the Philippines. They’ve published 500 highly influential reports which have helped bring down governments and start social movements.

The vision of PCIJ, Mangahas says, is to ensure that good journalism leads to good government. These days, this doesn’t just include professional media – it includes citizen media as well. The hope is that the values and standards of solid investigative journalism are embraced in online and citizen media as well as in traditional media.

- Kubatana wins the third Breaking Borders award for Advocacy. Kubatana is an amazingly energetic and creative association of NGOs in Zimbabwe committed to the spread of information within the country. Co-founder Brenda Burrell explains that most projects have focused on getting information out of Zimbabwe to the rest of the world. The real challenge, she explains, is spreading information domestically.

There’s no independent television, newspaper or community radio in Zimbabwe. People use mobile phones, but they’ve got virtually no internet access via those phones. Kubatana’s built a huge email and SMS list around employment opportunities (critical in a society with over 80% unemployment). While Kubatana is being honored for their technically creative Freedom Fone, Brenda tells us that the next project is a newspaper, produced by local people, distributed as wrapping paper for produce. It’s incredible to see such creativity reaching audiences who are profoundly offline as well as those online.

Congratulations to the award recipients!

An audio version of danah and my keynote is now available for download online. I recommend a background of lolcats – preferably multilingual ones – as you listen.

I gave a dozen public talks last month, and it’s possible that ROFLCon was the most intimidating of the bunch. I was asked by Tim Hwang, internet researcher (and Berkman Center affiliate) co-founder of The Awesome Foundation and of ROFLCon, to kick off the event by co-keynoting with (dear friend) danah boyd. danah actually works in the deep swamps of contemporary internet culture, so ROFLCon – a conference that takes both a loving and scholarly look at the phenomenon of internet memes – is close to home turf for her. I, on the other hand, tend to study things like the impact of cellphones in political organizing in the developing world, and wondered if there was any possible way to connect the sort of issues I work on with a conference that featured Mahir Cagri (of I Kiss You fame), the owner and videographer of Keyboard Cat and the author of Garfield Minus Garfield.

Turns out I was underestimating ROFLCon. Yes, there were panels where the main question seemed to be, “What’s it like to be a microcelebrity”… which may have included the panel danah and I moderated. And yes, there’s nothing to make you feel old and decrepit like walking into a panel where you don’t know a single one of the internet memes being celebrated. (No, I’d never heard of cornify. No, my world has not been substantially broadened by listening to their founder, wearing a unicorn mask, discuss vampires.) On the other hand, the panel on race – I can haz dream? – was one of the best conference panels I’ve ever attended. (If any network execs are reading this blog, let me just point out that a late night show based around Baratunde Thurston and Christian Lander would kill.) And many of the people at the conference seemed to be deeply engaged in the sorts of issues danah and I were talking about – Who creates internet culture? Whose voices are amplified and whose aren’t? What happens when marginal, weird cultures become mainstream?

Alex Leavitt did an excellent job of liveblogging our talks. I thought I’d post my notes and some of my slides as well – the full slide deck is online, though isn’t real useful without accompanying notes, which follow below.

It’s not easy being an academic at a conference like ROFLCon. The stars are the folks who’ve done something wonderful, weird, unforgetable, or so wonderfully weird it’s unforgetable. Those of us who are trying to make observations about the field feel a little like musicologists studying Bach – we can study his compositions exhaustively, but we’re acutely aware that we’re not going to write a mighty fugue. No matter how much I might study internet memes, I know I’m never going to accomplish something as majestic as keyboard cat… and I have to live with that truth every day of my life.

Unlike danah who can actually tell you something about internet culture, I study information in the developing world. Basically, I’m interested in the question of whether the internet, mobile phones and community radio can make people healthier, wealthier and more free.

If you work in this field for very long, you’ll end up realizing that the basic question behind development economics is “Why are some people rich and other people poor?” There are better and worse answers to these questions. Some of the smartest answers focus on which parts of the world had animals and plants that were easily domesticated and which had endemic diseases. Other smart answers look at the ways in which colonialism held back development or look at the problems of bad governance and persistent conflict. Bad answers to the questions focus on the idea that some people are inherently, biologically smarter than others. This idea – “scientific racism” – surfaces throughout history, as the basis for eugenics and more recently in psuedo-scientific analyses of IQ scores.

If you’d like to understand just what a stinking heap of bullshit scientific racism theories are, I recommend spending some time in very poor nations. You’ll discover that many of the people you meet display extraordinary creativity as they navigate the challenges of everday survival. And you’ll start learning about people like William Kamkwamba, whose near death from famine in Malawi didn’t prevent him from building a fiendishly ingenious power-generating windmill from an old bicycle and some recycled PVC pipe.

My time in the developing world suggests to me that intelligence, creativity and humor are evenly distributed throughout the world. People’s ability to express their intelligence, creativity and humor – and our ability to encounter said traits – are heavily geographically constrained, but the basic distribution is near constant.

All of which leads us to the question at hand today: Daddy, where do memes come from? I suspect Drew will be asking me this question any day now, due to Rachel and my egregious tendency to misuse Cafe Press and the fact that we gave him the middle name “Wynn” in part so we could title his blog “For the Wynn“. In answering these questions, I find that I’m usually referring to Randall Munroe’s brilliant
Online Communities map, and to the fertile equatorial regions that extend from the Gulf of YouTube through the Ocean of Subculture. Within this region, there are areas whose soils – turned black with the charring of endless flamewars – are especially fertile for the cultivation of new memes. (sup, /b/?)

I’m interested in mapping memes in a different way. Here’s a quick and dirty map of internet memes extracted from Know Your Meme. Yes, the US and Japan dominate global memetics (or, at least, they do based on the site, which has its own – recognized, now being addressed – cultural biases). But there’s a huge number of memes coming from almost all corners of the globe.

In development economics, we pay special attention to the so-called BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China – who we expect to become increasingly important over the next few decades due to their large populations, natural resources and rates of economic growth. And so we shouldn’t be surprised to find distinctly regional memes emerging from each of these countries – I offer as a gallery of superheroes Brother Sharp from China, Golimar from India, Glazastik from Russia and the legion that is Tenso from Brazil. You may not know who these viral wonders are, but the people who live in these rapidly developing nations do.

Assume I’m right and that creativity has a near-constant distribution. Assume also that access to the internet continues its explosive spread. The inescapable conclusion is that the next wave of internet memes is going to come from the developing world.

It’s already happening – I just watched the first major Kenyan internet meme come to life. The Nairobi-based band called “Just a Band” released a video for a song called “Ha-He” off their new album. The video’s absurdly good – it’s shot by the guys in the band, and it introduces a new superhero: Makmende.

Actually, “Makmende Amerudi” means “Makmende has returned”… “Makmende” was what you called a kid in the neighborhood in Kenyan in the 1990s who wanted to be Bruce Lee. I heard it and assumed that it was a sheng word – “sheng” is the blend of Swahili and English that’s Kenya’s unofficial national language – turns out that “Makmende” is what happens when Kenyans say “Go ahead, make my day”.

So Makmende kicks the ass of all comers in this video, gets the girl… who he promptly ignores, and spouts some incomprehensible but pithy aphorisms. This video went crazy in the Kenyan blogosphere – which is an extremely creative space – and we started seeing Makmende magazine covers, a 10,000 shilling note and lots of video remixes.

Above, we see a local television reporter come to a rapid and bad end when he has the misfortune of finding Makmende’s house… in sort of a Nairobi version of the Blair Witch project. And yes, Hitler’s upset about Makmende as well… But the best stuff actually has pretty low production values – it’s the website aggregating the sort of Makmende one-liners that shot across Twitter for a week or so after the video became popular. Sure, lots of the content here could have appeared on Chuck Norris Facts, but much of what’s there is indigenous to Kenya, and may not make sense if you’re not Kenyan.

Makmende’s so badass that he raises two philosophical questions for me. The first is, “Who gets to decide what’s a meme?”

Brilliant and funny lexicographer Erin McKean tells us that new worlds enter the language because people love them enough to use them. Lexicographers aren’t the bouncers at the language club; they’re anthropologists, discovering and documenting how language gets used. This is clearly how memes work as well – if people adopt it, love it and transform, it’s a meme… and what anyone else says doesn’t matter.

But it sure as hell helps if it ends up in Wikipedia. Getting Makmende into Wikipedia was one of the first things Kenyans tried to do… and getting things into Wikipedia is a lot harder than it used to be. The article was deleted a couple of times before the authors realized that they needed to make the case that Makmende was Kenya’s first major internet meme, which made it notable. It hasn’t made it into Know Your Meme yet – it was summarily deadpooled when last submitted.

My hope is that all of us who are interested in internet culture can be anthropologists, not bouncers. Yes, not everything that gets posted online is worthy of our study and amplification… but it’s worth keeping in mind that we sometimes don’t understand the unfamiliar at first and would find it intensely cool if we took a bit more time to try and understand it.

My second question is: “Who gets to play along with an internet meme?” On the one hand, there’s not much preventing you from adding some Makmende facts to the mix. On the other hand, a lot of the funny stuff already posted doesn’t make much sense unless you know the language and the culture. “Makmende hangs his clothes on a Safaricom line” only is funny if you know that Safaricom is Kenya’s largest mobile phone company and doesn’t have any traditional phone lines.

My sense is that most memes don’t cross between cultures because we don’t understand the language, don’t understand the references or weren’t paying attention to that corner of the internet to start with. Those that do tend to be funny in a way that’s independent of language. The Back Dorm Boys are pretty funny, and it’s not hard to figure out how to join in the fun.

This question parallels one that internet scholars are spending a lot of time on: Do we have one internet or many? When a country like China heavily censors their internet and encourages the growth of a parallel internet, do we hit a point where it just doesn’t make sense to talk about “the internet” anymore? Perhaps we’ve got to talk about internets, and how they interconnect. And if 340 million Chinese internet users look mostly at Chinese sites, laugh at Chinese memes, maybe it makes sense that the Chinese internet will eventually run on its own protocols, which might make it easier to censor or control. Go far enough down this road and you can imagine diverging internets, each trying to best meet the needs of their users, and no longer having a world where we readily peer into each other’s internets.

If we care about a single, united internet, it is imperative that we develop, discover and disseminate internet memes that we can laugh at together. When governments censor political sites on the internet, they alienate the small portion of their populations who already identify as politically dissident – and they can make the case that they’re protecting their citizens from terrorism or incitement to violence or pornography. But when they block our access to videos of cats flushing toilets, we see them for the heavy-handed bullies that they are. The cute cats serve as cover traffic for more serious political speech – so long as chinese users want to laugh at our cat videos, we’re encouraging people to circumvent censorship and potentially encounter all sorts of stuff on YouTube.

The Chinese have developed cute cat technology. Even a cursory glance at Youku shows that the once apparently insurmountable cat gap has been thoroughly bridged. And not just simple cute cats – Youku features cats flushing toilets! And not just western style toilets – squat toilets as well! If we accept my assertion that it’s politically critical for us to LOL together, we need not just to be studying Chinese net memes – we need to develop memes we can LOL at across cultures.

When we cross cultural borders in internet memespace, we’re usually laughing at someone else. Engrish, funny though it is, is basically the act of laughing at someone for failing to speak your (absurdly complex and irregular) mother tongue. I’m deeply impressed with people like Mahir Ça?r? who managed to turn the experience of being laughed at by the entire internet into laughing along with the joke. It takes an unusual personality to pull this off – I’m not sure that laughing at and inviting folks to laugh along is always the best way to go.

I’d rather take the example of Matt Harding, the video game developer who spent years travelling the world, dancing badly. After the success of his first video, Matt discovered that the piece of music he’d used – “Sweet Lullaby” by Deep Forest – had a problematic history. The very short version – the French musicians behind Deep Forest used a lullaby from the Solomon Islands to record their hit song, without seeking permission from the woman who sang the song and over the explicit objections of the musicologist who recorded it. Worse, they presented it in such a way that most listeners thought it came from central Africa, not from the south Pacific.

Matt could have dismissed this story as an ugly footnote to his adventures with internet fame. To his great credit, he didn’t. Instead, he went to Auki, a small town in the Solomon Islands, to interview a nephew of Afunakwa, the woman who’d recorded the original song. It was his way of apologizing for the complex past of the song, and his way of using the weirdness of internet fame to make his world – and all those of us who’ve watched the video – a little wider.

My conclusions?
- We can go from weird to wide, as Matt did, using the strange and quirky corners of the internet to prod us into curiosity
- It’s worth asking ourselves if we’re laughing at, or laughing with. And if we don’t like the answer, perhaps we need to change our behavior.
- Anthropologists are cooler than bouncers.
- If we don’t laugh at Chinese internet memes – the first step towards getting Chinese users to laugh at global memes – the censors win.
- “Erinaceous” is a totally awesome word.

Highlights of presenting the talk included:

- Co-presenting with danah, which encouraged significantly sillier behavior than I generally engage in when on stage. I’d like to believe that I would always be willing to crouch behind a podium wearing a fluffy red hat before delivering a keynote… but it’s just not true. Add danah to the mix and it suddenly is.

- Matt Harding jumping up when his name was mentioned and dancing in the audience. I’m thankful that he came on stage after the talk to introduce himself and apologize if I freaked him out by spontaneously hugging him. I just think he’s wicked cool and deserves recognition for using the internet to show us (one facet of) how wide and wonderful the world can be.

- Meeting Mahir, who turns out to be utterly lovely in person. Yes, he immediately started filming our meeting via flip video and digital camera, and yes, he did invite me, my wife and infant son to visit him in Izmir… but I got the sense that it wasn’t in any way an act, just his particular version of friendliness. It felt more wonderful than weird.

- Talking with the guys from Know Your Meme, who are working really hard to ensure that their site is global and inclusive, and who are trying to take some pages from the Global Voices playbook, recruiting local editors who understand memes in their corners of the world. I’ve got high hopes of a Makmende article in development soon, and hope perhaps for a GV/KYM alliance where we source and research global memes.

In other words, I had a blast. Thanks to everyone involved and hope you had as much fun as I did.